In 'Faith for Better Promises,' Craig Greatman explores Hebrews 11:32-40, emphasizing the importance of knowing God personally rather than merely knowing about Him. He discusses the acts of faith performed by biblical figures like Gideon, Barak, Samson, and others, highlighting that their faith was a result of God's sovereign grace and was often expressed in times of national spiritual darkness and personal imperfection. The sermon stresses that the chapter is not a museum of heroes but a testament to what God can do through weak people who trust Him. Greatman also contrasts the different outcomes of faith, such as receiving miracles or enduring suffering, explaining that faith's reality is not measured by outcomes but by seeing and knowing God. He points out that the 'better promise' of the New Covenant is realized in Christ, who is now accessible in a personal way that the Old Testament figures only saw from afar. The sermon encourages believers to seek a close, personal relationship with God and to find Him in the ordinary means of grace within the church community.

Continue to stand as we maintain our orientation to the Lord. When we read his word, we proclaim his name. I will say that it is glorious, so glorious, to hear the body of Christ sing the way you sing. I envy you. I'm glad to hear this.

It is beautiful. We are going to be reading from the text in the New Testament from Hebrews 11 this morning. This is where I've taken my word or God's word for the sermon. I'm going to begin in verse 32. This is the word of the Lord.

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release so that they might arise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment.

They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God has provided something better for us that apart from us they should not be made perfect." This once again is the Word of the Lord and we thank you Father for it. We ask that you would move in our hearts, that we would succumb to the Word and its power over our lives because your Holy Spirit has written it, has opened our ears, and stirred our hearts to receive it. Lord, may the words of my own mouth and the meditations of my own heart this morning be acceptable to you as you are a witness to being my rock and my redeemer.

Lord, thank you once again. And it is in Christ Jesus' name we pray, amen. Please be seated. Now, if there is anything that I have missed or done wrongly this morning, you can tell me right now, did I miss a part of the service yet? We're okay?

Okay. Again, I'm a guest in your house. I absolutely love Peter and he's he has been so good and gracious to me. I don't know why if you know how we know each other, but he has been very kind to me since moving here to Texas and I'm just really grateful for him and for this opportunity We talk a lot I guess you probably you might know this we talked a lot about politics Peter and I and one of the things it is coming into political season once again, and it is for me very important to remember who God is during this time because I really can get bent out of shape and the people in charge and I'm not the king or the president and I get really mad sometimes and so I really need Jesus to show up for me often and that's why I'm with you taking you through Hebrews 11 32 through 40 this morning because I'm preaching to myself. So this morning when We took a look at a little bit at Psalm 143 by singing it.

And I love the Psalms. In the Psalms, we read many things that remind us from the psalmist to us about who God is and how we need to orient ourselves. In Psalm 116, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications and a little farther on, for you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling." And then the psalmist asks a question, what shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits toward me? And the answer is, I will take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. Before we go anywhere else in this passage, I want you to notice with me this is not a psalm about God.

It's a psalm to God. I love the Lord because he heard my voice. The psalmist wrote it because he was heard. He had been answered, he had been pulled back from the edge of something by hands he could not see, and he knew whose hands they were. That was not a man reciting what he believes about God.

That is a man who knows God. I want us to hold on to that this morning because here in Hebrews 11 that Psalm is told across the thousand years. There's a whole nation of people who have met with God or knew God in some way or form. Many of them heard his voice. Some whose feet did not keep, he did not keep from falling, whose eyes he did not keep from tears and who loved him just the same.

And as Psalm 116 ends, It ends at a cup. Later on this morning, we're going to go to a cup. We're going to go to the table, and we're going to walk towards that this morning. The Lord Jesus Christ is a person. He can be known.

Not admired from a distance, not affirmed on a page, known the way the man in Psalm 116, the way the men and women in Hebrews 11 knew him, the way a wife knows a husband, the way you know a friend whose voice you would recognize in the dark. Hebrews 11 is not a chapter about people who believe the right things about God. It is a chapter about people who knew God and who were known by Him and who would not let go of Him when it cost them everything. And verse 40 says that the something better God has provided for us, for us, for you, for me in this room, is the one they saw only far off who has come near. I grew up in a Jewish home.

I knew a lot about God. I was taught the Shema, I was taught all the prayers, I was taught the Old Testament to read the Torah and to know and love the Torah was equal to all the commandments. I was taught, Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohein Adonai, Chod, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. I never doubted that there was a God, but I only knew that God from a distance, and my life reflected that for a long time. When the God We have, we believe only as a proposition.

When that person has a name, we often, instead of realizing that he is present and he is a person were restrained because we're thinking about it conceptually as a proposition we think about him. That's why this letter matters to me so much. I know so many lost people After preaching in churches for a long time, after planting churches, I know so many lost people who come to church and who know the propositions, who even may know the catechisms, who know the confessions. They know the proposition about God, but they very few know Him. My own people, they know the Shema.

They knew the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the only God there is. Nobody in the congregation I grew up needed to be convinced of a single proposition about God, and the writer of this letter to the Hebrews is worried about such people. In chapter 2, therefore, we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard lest we drift away. In chapter 3, today, if you will hear his voice, Do not harden your hearts. In chapter 10, let us draw near.

Draw near. You have heard every word correctly, and yet you drift. You have heard every word rightly, and yet you're far away. You've been going through Isaiah, so many of you probably already know this, because you've been living there for a few months at least. Remember how Isaiah starts his whole book, chapter 1 verse 3.

The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not consider. Not Israel has bad theology, Israel does not know. The most privileged people on earth who are given the word of God, scrolls were put in their hands and the Lord's complaint is that his own people have stopped knowing him. That is the wound Isaiah is written to heal, and it is the wound Hebrews is written to heal.

I don't say this to any of you, particularly if it doesn't apply, let it fly, but I say this as a man who knows drift from the inside because I'm very capable of drift every week of my life. It is possible to sit under the best preaching in Texas and confess the best confessions ever written and go home having not met the one. So this morning I'm not going to try to convince you that God exists or that the Bible is true or that Christ is the Son of God. You all know that. I'm going to try to show you from this chapter that the God you know about is a God who can be known and that he means to be known by you.

Most difficult part of this chapter instinctually I think is that it's not about faith, it's about distance. These are giants of the faith. Gideon, Samson, David, women receiving their dead back, men sawn in two rather than denying the Lord. I look at my own week, the ordinary irritations, the prayers that were more habit than hunger. I feel this chapter sometimes can become a museum.

Beautiful, roped off, it's not for touching. If that's you, If you're anything like me, sometimes we misread this chapter. It is not a museum of heroes. It is a record of what the living God did with people who knew him. And the God who did it has not changed.

He has not retired. He has not moved out of Conroe. Let's look at verse 32 and what more shall I say for the time would fail me. I love that the writer of Hebrews knew what it was like to run out of time in a sermon. He has been going through the role since verse 4.

Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moshe, Rehab. And now he stops naming and starts listing because the lists is too long. Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. Then in verse 33 and 34 he gives us nine things they did. Hear them as nine verbs because that's what they are.

Through faith they subdued kingdoms, they worked righteousness, they obtained promises, they stopped the mouths of lions, they quenched the violence of fire, they escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness they were made strong they became valiant in battle they turned to flight the armies of the aliens nine verbs is the first thing you're going to notice is not one of these nine verbs describe something about a huge something that a human being can do. I don't know about you, but I certainly cannot stop the mouth of a lion, and I don't want to try. I don't want to invite you to do that either. I can't do it by believing hard enough. I cannot quench a furnace with just being sincere.

Every one of those nine verbs is the description of something that God did with a man's hand in it. So I'm going to point out three things these men had in common because they are not the things that many people expect. First, their faith was the work of sovereign grace. The Westminster Confession says it exactly in chapter 14, Quote, the grace of faith whereby the elect are unable to believe to the saving of their souls is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts. Gideon did not generate his faith.

Samson certainly did not. The Spirit of God wrought faith in them, and then the Spirit of God, through the author of Hebrews, wrote a chapter commending his own work. That's what this chapter is, the Holy Spirit honoring what the Holy Spirit did. Which means it's not primarily a chapter about what you or I should do, it's a chapter about what God does. I don't want you to leave here, I think it's Silly, but sometimes people think about, well, we should stop the mouth of lions.

They did it. Should I be doing it? Again, nobody should be putting their head in a lion's mouth or anything like that. What is being described is the kind of God who is at work when his people trust him. That's the first thing about these people.

Secondly, their faith was displayed in times of national spiritual darkness. Gideon, Barak, Sampson, Jephthah, those are all judges. And you know the verdict on that era. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. It was into that climate that God raised men who knew him.

I say that for your encouragement and for my own. It is easy to look at the church and the nation and conclude that God, the God of the Bible, has gone quiet. He has not. Some of the loudest chapters in history, in the history of redemption, were written in the quietest, darkest generations. Hold on to that.

Thirdly, about these men, Their faith was expressed in spite of their own imperfections. Look at the list. Gideon laid out a fleece. God spoke to him. He laid out a fleece twice because he did not quite believe what God had told him to his face.

Barak would not go to battle unless Deborah went with him. I think I'm gonna ask my wife to jump in front of a bullet. No, it's crazy to think about. Samson, I don't need to tell you about Samson, but Jephthah, he made a vow about his daughters no man should ever make. David committed adultery and murder and covered it up for the better part of a year.

These are the men in verse 32. And it's not an accident. Verse 34 tells us why. Out of weakness were made strong. The strength was never in them.

If it had been, you and I'd be looking at a chapter of heroes to admire from a distance, like we often do. Instead, we are looking at a chapter of weak men who knew a strong God. And that, brothers and sisters, is a chapter with room in it for you and for me. Let's look at these nine verses. I think from these nine verses we can get some things, nine verbs, excuse me, we can get some things that will carry forth through the rest of our lives.

Some of you may know the name John Frame. He's been an OPC pastor for years and he's quite a scholar. He wrote a book called The Doctrine of God. I happen to be a little bit of a fan, if not a studier and appreciator of John Frame's work. He makes a very simple observation, which I frequently think about regarding God.

He says that when the Bible calls God Lord, It means three things at once. It means He is in control. It means He has authority. It means His Word is law. It means He is present.

So He is with His people in covenant. So there's control, authority, and presence. Three things, one Lord. And then Framon goes on to describe a miracle not as a violation of nature but as an extraordinary display of God's covenant lordship. A miracle is what it looks like when the Lord shows up unmistakably.

It's who He is. So let's go back to these nine verbs and watch what happens. Subdued kingdoms, stop the mouths of lions, quench the violence of fire, turn to flight the armies of the aliens that's control That is a God for whom kingdoms and lions and furnaces and armies are all on a leash Daniel did not negotiate with the lions. God shut their mouths. Then we see in these verbs, worked righteousness and obtained promises.

That's authority. God's word governs the outcome, not a king's, not a congressman's. God's Word. You heard this when we read Ezra this morning. Listen to how that book opens.

If the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia. The Word. The most powerful man on earth, a pagan, was the instrument of a promise God had made 70 years earlier through a weeping prophet in a besieged city. And Isaiah once again, he put it the way that you've been hearing all year, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please.

That's verse 33 in our passage this morning. Promises obtained because the world, the word that made them cannot come back empty. Then the last verb, out of weakness were made strong, and that's God's presence. Again, control, authority, and presence. The strength was not in Gideon.

The Lord was with Gideon. I brought frame up in a sermon on knowing Christ because control and authority by themselves, you can know about God. You can know about control and authority. You can believe control and authority from a distance. A God who's only powerful and only law is a God you can hold in your head and never meet.

It's the third one, presence, that turns a doctrine into a person. I will be with you is not a proposition. It is a promise made by someone, to someone, and it can only be kept by showing up. Look at Gideon. Do you remember what God said to him under the Terebinth tree?

The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor. And what was Gideon's first question? It was not a question about power. It was not a question about power. It was not a question about doctrine.

It was a question about presence. Oh my Lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? That's the honest question of a man who has heard about God all his life. Where are all his miracles which our fathers told us about? Where are they?

He has never met God. He has the stories. He has the words. He is threshing wheat in a wine press, hiding from Midian, and God is a thing his fathers told him about. And the Lord did not argue with him.

He did not stand, He did not hand him a syllabus. He said, surely I will be with you. Presence. That's the answer that we're looking for, that I'm looking for every day, that I want to share with you. The rest of Gideon's story is a story of a man learning that the God his fathers told him about is a God who was actually there.

It's Isaiah's answer to, I don't know how far you guys are in Isaiah. How far are you in Isaiah? Remember? It's okay. So he says, he gives power to the weak and to those who have no might he increases strength.

Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength out of weakness made strong by a God who was near enough to give it. So about these three verses, I want you to hear this with encouragement. The supernatural in Hebrews 11 is not an exception to who God is. It is who God is on display. God did not become powerful for Gideon and then go back to normal.

God is always in control. God's Word is always law. God is always with his people. The judges era was simply a season when he let it be seen. And the same Lord, control, authority, and presence is the God you have come to meet this morning, not a different God, not a quieter God, the same God.

I'm going to ask you four questions before going forward that I want you to sit with as we move towards the end of the sermon. One, God's Lordship is not confined to the sanctuary. Not one of those nine verbs happened in a worship service. They happened on battlefields and in throne rooms and in dens. The God who knew Gideon in a wine press knows you on Monday at the office, at the kitchen table on Tuesday night, when the conversations get hard, in the hospital room, at the desk when the numbers don't match.

There is no square inch of our lives where the Lord is not our Lord, which means there is no square inch where He is not near. God delights to honor faith that has nothing else to lean on. Notice the conditions. Weakness, fire, the edge of the sword, foreign armies. God did not do these things for people who had it under control.

He did them for people who were not who were out of options. Faith is not a lever on God. It is not a currency we pay him so he will act. Our confession says faith's principal acts are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone. Faith is the empty hand.

It brings nothing. It receives a person. That's why God sent 31, 700 of Gideon's men home and kept 300. Lest Israel claim glory for itself against me, saying, my own hand has saved me. 300 could not possibly mistake whose hand it was.

Thirdly, God is glorified when his people are satisfied in him. And so he does not do things halfway. Of course, John Piper made a whole ministry desiring God out of that phrase. The first question of your catechism, I'm sure most of you know it, Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Those are not two ends.

Those are one. God is glorified in the joy of his people. And joy is not something you have in a proposition. Nobody ever enjoyed a doctrine forever. You enjoy someone.

And so when God delivers, He does not deliver grudgingly. Women received their dead raised to life again. Not comforted in their grief, not given a sense of peace about it, they got their sons back breathing. So again in those three points now I'm gonna ask four questions. When do you most expect to meet God?

Be honest about this. Is it in crisis? When you have finally run out of your own resources? Is it on a random Thursday? Or do you expect to meet him at all?

Only to learn about him. Second, where is your confidence in God most often displayed? Not where you say it is. Where it actually shows. If someone watched your life for a month, where would they conclude you actually believe God is present?

Third, How can you tell when you are most reliant upon God as opposed to your own resources and abilities? This is a hard one for capable people and there are many capable people in here, I'm sure Competence is a gift. It is also the most respectable form of unbelief there is, because it never looks like unbelief. It looks like diligence. And knowledge is a gift too.

Well stocked mind can be most respectable, it can be the most respectable way there is of keeping the Lord at arm's length. Fourthly, when you pray, are you speaking to someone or performing a duty in the general direction of heaven. Could you be, could it be said of you, I should say, that you could tell the difference when you say, He has heard my voice like the psalmist? As you sit with those, we're going to move forward to verse 35, and I want you to see the important hinge between, in this single verse, It's not two separate verses. I want you to see this.

Women received their dead raised to life again. Full stop. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance that they might obtain a better resurrection. These are two halves of this of one verse. Same word, faith, same God, two utterly different outcomes in this life.

So let's look at the first half. I don't want to rush past this. The writer had two stories in mind. I'm going to read them to you because I want you to feel the weight of what's being claimed. The first is in 1 Kings 17.

Elijah is staying with the widow Zarephath, a Gentile widow, outside Israel in the middle of a famine and her son gets sick and dies and she says the thing every grieving mother has thought. What have I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to kill my son?" And Elijah takes the boy upstairs and lays him on his own bed and cries out to God. Listen to verse 22. Then the Lord heard the voice of Elijah and the son of the child came back to him, the soul of the child came back to him and he revived.

And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother. And Elijah said, See your son lives. Then the woman said to Elijah, now by this I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord is in your mouth and in his truth. The second story is in 2 Kings 4, where Elisha is with a Shunammite woman the one who built him a room on his on a roof and her boy dies out in the harvest in his father's lap and she rides the prophet and will not let go of his feet and Elisha goes in shuts the door and prays and in verse 34 he went up and lay on the child and put his mouth on his mouth, his eyes on his eyes, and his hands on his hands. And he stretched himself out on the child, and the flesh of the child became warm.

And then the child sneezed seven times and opened his eyes and Elisha said pick up your son and she fell at his feet and bowed to the ground and picked up her son and went out. Notice what the widow of Zarephath says when she gets back, gets her son back, because for all of us it teaches us something similar. She does not say, now I know you have power. She says, now I know that the word of the Lord in your mouth is the truth. The miracle that God did through Elijah served the word.

It did not replace it. It did not compete with it. And it was not the point. The miracle was not the point. That's the order this church has always kept.

And I think I want to honor it for Peter and for you. The word comes first. The word is central. But look at the verb she uses. Now I know you.

She had heard the word of the Lord in that man's mouth for months. She had fed him from her last handful of flour and on the strength of it, she kept feeding him. And now with her son warm in her arms, she says, now I know you. In the Hebrew Scriptures, that word to know is never a word for information. It is the word for Adam and Eve.

It is the word for what God says of Abraham on the mountain. Now I know that you fear God. It is the word Isaiah uses for the whole point of history. The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. It means to know someone the way you know a person you have lived with intimately.

The widow did not come out of that upper room with a better theology of resurrection. That widow came out knowing him. The boy was dead. His mother had held his body and then he was warm and then he sneezed and then she picked him up and walked out of the room with him. That happened in space and time in a real house to a real woman.

The living God reached into death and took a child back out of it. The God who did that is our God. He has not lost the ability. He has not lost the interest. Again our psalm this morning, you have delivered my soul from death.

The second half of that same verse is where I think many of us live. I know I live there more often than not. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Some received their sons back from death. Others are tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.

The writer is almost certainly thinking about the martyrs of the Maccabean period in Jewish history during this intertestamental period. There are writings regarding the Greek king Antiochus, and he tried to stomp out Israel's worship of the Lord through the entire region. And there's an account of seven brothers and their mother who were tortured to death one after the other in front of each other for refusing to eat pork and Deny the covenant they had with God Every one of them was offered release by the king But not accepting deliverance they could have walked out They stayed and they died that they might obtain a better resurrection. Some mothers saw their children resurrected or healed. One mother saw seven children brutally murdered in front of her and that's the same faith.

And when the rider keeps going the list gets worse. Mocking, scourgings, chains, prison. They were stoned. Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, stoned in the temple courts of the king's order. They were sawn in two.

There's a tradition that says that Isaiah under Manasseh was sawn in two. They were slain with the word, wandering in sheep skins and goat skins, destitute, afflicted, tormented, living in deserts, mountains, dens, and caves. Two halves of the same faith. Widows that got their son back through faith. A mother who watched her seven sons die in faith.

This is the same spirit given faith, the same God. One received a resurrection on an ordinary afternoon in an upper room, the other is still waiting for hers. And Hebrews puts them in the same verse and commends them with the same word, which means this, the reality of our faith is not measured by outcomes. Let me say that again, Because I think it's the single most freeing sentence in this chapter for me and for all suffering Christians. The reality of our faith is that it's not measured by what God did with it in this life.

Then what's it measured by? Hebrews 11 verse 1, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Verse 27 about Moses, He endured as seeing him who was invisible. Faith is a kind of seeing, not seeing outcomes, seeing Christ. The widow at Zarephath saw her son breathe.

The mother of the seven sons saw a better resurrection that had not happened yet. Both of them saw God. That's what faith does. It sees the invisible God and it holds on to him. You could not have tortured those seven brothers into denying a proposition.

You don't, people don't deny propositions under torture. What happens to the human psyche if it's just a proposition, is that we surrender. We know we could be wrong. When you know Him, you will give up your life. The tradition of Isaiah, once again, if it's right, that Isaiah was the man who was sawn into in verse 37.

I think it was. That was the man who in the year King Uzziah died said, my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. He did not say I have concluded that the Lord is King, he said, I have seen the King. Everything he wrote for the next 60 years came out of that space. And when he wrote, your dead shall live together with my dead body they shall arise, awake and sing you who dwell in dust.

He was writing about a resurrection he could trust because he had seen the one who would give it. He preached the better resurrection. He died believing it. He is still waiting for it in the company of the just men made perfect and he will get it in God's time. How does a reformed Christian hold these two halves in verse 35 together without either despairing or pretending?

We already have the sentence in the Westminster Catechism in chapter 5, paragraph 3, God in his ordinary providence maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them at His pleasure. One more time. Ordinarily, God works through means. Doctors, rain, armies, elders, bread, but he is free, free to work without means, above means, and against means, at his pleasure, not at ours, not on a schedule we can trigger. Zarepheth is God working above means.

The cave in verse 38 is God working through the means of suffering. Both are under that one sentence. Both are the free sovereign pleasure of God toward people he loved and who knew him. We often sing a hymn, not often, but I'm sure you've sung the hymn, father I know that all my life is portioned out for me. Father I know.

Not I have been informed. Not I believe the proposition. The son given back and the son taken away were both portioned out by the same father with the same hands from the same love. One more thing in verse 38 regarding presence. Of whom the world was not worthy, they wandered in deserts and mountains and dens and caves of the earth.

Where was God when his people were in the caves? He was in the caves. The Lord who was with Gideon in the wine press was with Isaiah under the saw and with those seven brothers in front of the king. He was present in the den with the lion and was in the upper room with Zarephath. The world did not notice these people.

The world was not worthy of them. Heaven noticed. Heaven recorded every name and Heaven's verdict on people. The world walks past as the world was not worthy. So I want to speak to you once again.

Could be someone in here, someone you know. But I know and I'm sure your pastor knows, many of you probably know as well, that some of you have prayed the widow's prayer and received the martyr's answer. You prayed for the child and the child did not get up. You prayed for the marriage and it ended anyway. You prayed for the diagnosis to be wrong and it was right.

And somewhere in you, somewhere in me, a quiet voice has said one time or another, then maybe my faith was not real. Maybe if I had believed better. Verse 35 puts us in the same chapter as the widow of Zarephath. Same verse, same word. Having obtained a good testimony through faith, God is not grading you, He is not grading me by outcome.

He wrote our name next to hers and more than that the Lord who did not give you what you asked for did not leave the room. He was as present and is as present in your cave as he ever was in Zarephath's upper room. You may not have received what you prayed for. You've not been left alone with your loss. God knows you.

He is here and He has been there with you. Let's go to verses 39 and 40 and this brings us to a close shortly. And all these having obtained a good testimony through faith did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us that they should not be made perfect apart from us. Having obtained a good testimony, commended, approved, God's own verdict on them was good, and yet did not receive the promise. How does that work?

Verse 33 said they obtained promises. Gideon got his victory. David got his throne. The widow got her son. What do you mean they did not receive the promise?

Because the promise was never finally a thing. It was never the land or the victory or the throne. These all died in faith, the word says, not having received the promises but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them, and confessed them that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth. Verse 16, they desire a better that is a heavenly country. And verse 26 about Moses, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.

This is what we need to see. Moses, 1400 years before Bethlehem was already choosing Christ. The promise was always Him. The land pointed to Him. The victory pointed to Him.

The throne of David pointed to David's greater son. They obtained promises, plural, and every one of those promises was a signpost pointing past itself to a person. A person they could only see far off. They did not want a thing from God. They wanted God, and He was not yet come in the body and spirit of Jesus Christ.

We heard it in Ezra this morning, the exiles went home, a promise obtained. They rebuilt the temple, a promise obtained. And do you remember what happened at the foundation laying in chapter 3 in Ezra? Young men shouted for joy and the old men who remembered Solomon's temple wept out loud because this one was so much less. The first temple was much better and a promise obtained and still not the promise.

That's verse 39 of Hebrews 11 in a single scene. And I say it once again, chapter 16, there's a lament over Moab, a pagan nation fleeing, its refugees begging Judah for shelter, and right in the middle of that funeral song, out of nowhere, verse 5, in mercy the throne will be established and one who will sit on it in truth, the tabernacle of David, judging and seeking justice and hastening righteousness, not a throne, one will sit on it. Seven hundred years before Bethlehem, Isaiah saw a person on a throne. He saw him afar off. He was assured of him and embraced him.

He never saw him up close. He did not receive the promise. He obtained a good testimony and he waited. He waited for God having provided something better for us. Better is Hebrew's favorite word.

Chapter 7, a better hope. Chapter 7 again, Jesus' assurity of a better covenant. Chapter 8, a better covenant, which was established on better promises. Chapter 9, better sacrifices. Chapter 10, a better and enduring possession.

Chapter 11 verse 16, a better country. Verse 35, a better resurrection. And chapter 4, you confess the fourth commandment this morning. We confess the fourth commandment and here's why it matters. There remains therefore a rest for the people of God, a better rest.

Every one of those is better for exactly one reason. Christ has come. Not promised, Christ has come. The one they saw afar we have seen close up. The one Moses chose without a name we know by name.

The one the widow's son was a whisper of walked out of a tomb outside Jerusalem and has sat down. The something better is not a better set of doctrines. Gideon did not die waiting for a confession of faith. He died waiting for a person, and the person has come, and his name is Jesus. I want you to understand what that means because it's glorious to us.

At least it should be. The perfection in view is not something Gideon earned or something you or I earned. Chapter 10, verse 14 tells us exactly what it is. For by one offering he has perfected, however, those who are being sanctified. One offering, perfected forever.

Isaiah 53, he shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant shall justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. By his knowledge, Isaiah says that many are justified by the knowledge of the servant. And whichever way you read that phrase, the knowing of him or his knowing of us, it's the same claim. Justification is not a transaction between strangers.

It is the servant bearing the sins of people he knows so that they may know him." That is the one offering. We see it from Isaiah's side. He gave it at the cross. The author of Hebrews is saying that Gideon and David and the widow And the martyrs were all waiting for that and the Lord God Almighty arranged history so that they would not receive until the whole family could receive it together. They waited for what we, the Church of the New Covenant, now stand in.

That does something to the museum we might see this through. I was talking about the beginning, that museum context. We thought, if you thought Hebrews 11 was a museum you can't touch, it turns out Hebrews 11 was a waiting room And everybody in it was waiting for what we have. We have a high priest, such a high priest in Hebrews 8, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens. Seated.

The work is finished. In chapter 12 verses 22 through 24, listen to what the writer says, you have already done by faith this morning, But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel. You have come. Not you will come, not you might come if you feel it, you have come. When this congregation gathered this morning and called upon the name of the Lord, you came by faith into the heavenly assembly, into the presence of the angels, into the company of the just men made perfect.

Gideon is there and the widow and the seven brothers and Isaiah and to Jesus. Not to a doctrine of Jesus, to him. That's not a metaphor, It's a description of what has happened. So let us say, let us understand this about the ordinary means of grace we sit under. I think it's practical for us as we get ready to take communion together.

The ordinary means of grace, the word preached, the sacraments, prayer, the fellowship of the saints. Those are not unsupernatural parts of the Christian life. Excuse me. God does something real when we participate in these things. They are not information about God who is elsewhere.

They are the appointed places where the Lord of control, authority, and presence has promised to meet us. The way He met Gideon under the tree, the widow in the upper room, and Isaiah in the temple. When the word is preached, He is speaking. When you pray, He is listening. He has heard my voice.

When you come to the table, He is there. You confessed, and you've confessed before the commandments of God and understanding the confessions of God. Nothing that we do on a Sunday morning is just ordinary. These are means of grace that our King provides for us to meet with Him in His presence. So we look unto Jesus together.

We meet Him together. There's an application and it's an object and he is a king and the object is not an idea. We don't look at ideas. Gideon with his fleece, David with his sin, the widow with her son, the mother with her seven, Isaiah under the saw, and you and I all looking at the same Christ, the author of our faith, who began it in you by his spirit, the finisher of your faith, who will not leave it half done. To the weary in this room the same Lord who was strong in Samson's weakness is strong in yours.

He has not run out. To the waiting in this room, verse 39 is not a disappointment. It is an inheritance held in trust until the whole family is gathered. You are not being denied. You are being kept for a better day.

To the one in this room who has known about him for a long time and has quietly wondered whether that is all there is. It is not all there is. He is knowable. He is here and he has never once turned away someone who came looking for him rather than for something from him. So keep sitting under his word, keep listening to your pastors and your elders, And keep maintaining your faithfulness to the ordinary week in, week out faithfulness of the local church.

And this is where he is found. I want to encourage that for all of you. That's chapter 11 verses 32 through 40 in Hebrews and we're going to prepare now. We're going to sing, I guess, and go to the hymnals. As I close, we're going to get ready.

I don't know how this transition, you just go right to your hymnal? Okay. So, Lord, I want to thank you for your word and for the reminder of what faith is and who has faith and what we do and what you do in this faith. So Lord, I eagerly, almost charismatically sometimes want to pray and beseech people to understand you are present, supernatural, and I trust that you're in and making aware the hearts and minds of others who understand We live in your presence all the time. For those who are weary and hurting, for those of us who've seen but seem like you're now far off, help us to renew our faith, to renew our trust, to remember your presence.

Give us the proportion of faith that we need to be fulfilled in your Word, to be filled by your Word, to trust your Word, and to not look at our circumstances but to look at you. We pray this in the mighty name of your son Jesus the Christ as your grateful adopted children.